Gillian Tett

Yes, after just 45 days in office, Liz Truss became Britain's shortest-serving Prime Minister, forced out by her own party colleagues because she'd misjudged not just Britain's creditworthiness, but also the power of the bond markets to effectively determine the country's economic fate.

The critical problem right now stalking much of the Western world has been an explosion in debt relative to GDP.

That's the Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett, who believes the story of bonds is really the story of spiralling national debt.

With a recent surge in worldwide interest rates, it's debt that's become hard for many governments to manage.

If the rates are ultra low, as they were in the last 15, 20 years, then actually it's pretty cheap to keep servicing debt.

But if interest rates start to rise suddenly, then you can see the interest payments suddenly explode.

And when that happens, governments can actually get into a death spiral where they end up with so much debt, they just can't repay the interest.

While the world's stock markets are now worth a combined $127 trillion, the bond markets are even bigger, valued at $145 trillion.

That's more than the world's annual GDP.

Luke Hickmore, the bond trader working with Aberdeen Investments.

I put it to him that having such a small number of unelected money men like himself effectively running national government policy wasn't in the interest of democracy.

But others aren't so sure.

Some say that policymakers are giving the bond markets way too much power.

But most mainstream economists now accept that debt levels for some of the biggest nations are getting out of control.

Here's Gillian Tett again.

The problem is that no politician really has much incentive to stand up and be honest with people and talk about the trade-offs that need to happen.

So unless there's a shock from outside, like a bond market crisis, it tends to be very hard for governments to actually make the difficult decisions they need to.

At the end of the day, bond markets, they show us unpalatable truths.